As I was reading this, I realized that the ESP32 HomeKit debugging session I had running was taking a while, and this happened:

Me: what are you doing?

Agent: I’m resolving Apple’s private video-resolution lookup table to determine whether iOS 26 supports 320×240 for HomeKit live streaming.

The decompiled source hides the numeric constants, so I:

- Downloaded/extracted the iOS 26.1 arm64e dyld cache to /workspace/tmp/ios26-dyld/.

- Built and installed the read-only apfs-fuse utility needed to mount Apple’s APFS image.

- Planned to extract HomeKitDaemon and decode its resolution table.

Me: Oh, OK. Carry on then

These are weird times.

▲

ctxc 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's insane, right? Reverse engineering is so much fun, I find myself doing it on random apps so often now

▲

bpavuk 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

it's especially fun when you do it yourself, I advise toying around with https://crackmes.one. with time and practice, everything becomes open-source because you can read assembly XD

▲

fragmede an hour ago | parent [-]

Not legally, which is the issue. I can "open source" Windows 11 and rip out some of the shittiness, but Microsoft is gonna take issue. If it were MIT licensed that would be a different story, but there isn't enough money for lawyers in the world where it's not.

▲

kevin_thibedeau 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Reverse engineering is legal in the US. You just can't disseminate the results if it runs afoul of copyright law or patents.

	▲	bpavuk 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		who said that you still technically cannot disseminate the results? bulletproof hosting and private communications still exist. if law is being used to harm the consumer, the consumer in question has full moral right to speak out against it, and taking ownership of your hardware (like OP tells they did) is one of the best ways

▲

fc417fc802 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So what? Just be mindful of what you post on the clearnet. What you're doing is like worrying about the illegality of making sparkler bombs in your backyard IMO.

▲

bpavuk an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I know enough people for whom this risk is the entire appeal

▲

jaggederest 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We're entering an age where doing binary modification on live binaries is not a huge deal. Everything is now open "source"?

▲

simpaticoder an hour ago | parent | next [-]

What is it called when there's a process that's available to individuals but is long and onerous and cannot be shared among them? Saying the binaries are open source now means that the work of reverse engineering will be repeated exactly in proportion to the number of times it's modified. I would argue on a large scale this is still effectively closed source.

▲

jaggederest 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

As soon as you can share binary patches (highly illegal of course) we're off to the races.

	▲	shepherdjerred 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Binary patches aren’t illegal right? How would they be?
	▲	fc417fc802 9 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		More like mildly illegal. Seems on par with torrents to me.

▲

debugnik an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I would move the quotes to "open" since the issue of licensing is still left. Although LLM providers have shown that they don't care about copyright so it should go both ways.

	▲	jaggederest 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Quotes for all of it, it's a closed binary that is transparently user modifiable these days I guess, so "open" "source".